


[Fandom stats] The second coming of the Good Omens fandom (July 2019)

by toastystats (destinationtoast)



Series: Fandom Stats [94]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-07-08 02:20:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19861912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinationtoast/pseuds/toastystats
Summary: A look at the first month and a half of activity in the Good Omens fandom post-TV show, and how it compares to the book fandom (all based on AO3 fanworks).





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> You can also look at the [original slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VD5OytlKha6ivoHZjaEzzOcHyBdjyFVrSNmcl-kv5Ms/edit?usp=sharing) and the [raw data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rkwwn3xrmwwGPO2hNbJfVtZPHbZd86m23lxceRJHz4U/edit?usp=sharing) for more information & for access to the text that appears in these images.

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipP5R4J4lnejSeJi2CXetZ6kvxq3euJjbMht0cTOYbF7W914iQSkw-kCAesO_msQeA?key=TTBkd1pwWWF1dTh4aHAzSUxvQmNDblhkRkZ3cHBn)

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipOJTl1k7H_IXra7u1ngNRQoMqsLMOJwu71Im3KAF0xoRyLrXLsUv7H28AUJPY6x_g?key=RDItaEFLWTFGUVE4Tl9RUDNpVExtOXVhOV9LNW1R)

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNeTWfaC_XRgWapjSOnjGuz3fc-OSOQH07QohEFxeG5021qHYMW59x5wIS9Xhkkbw?key=dmZCVW50SVlLMUhFaXg5RXM5M3VOX0U2TzRZQzRn)

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipN7mKjvJoywE5gKLYQN-RDEyKLinJ4f0zAr1dBpwA9BejCy1YFCYufDmQhODHGFOA?key=bjlOZGt4QUVuU3pzcnlFc3c0Y0s5akhfX0Vqb2ZR)

[ ](https://photos.app.goo.gl/cazDtD61a3YtqVew5)


	2. How big is Good Omens compared to other screen adaptations of books?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A comparison to the initial surges of activity in the Sherlock, Hobbit, Game of Thrones, and MCU fandoms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also available: [slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-kx4pU70RuRGG-mqceW2nSNzkRtjKdfxPuT_mGvHaDs/edit#slide=id.p) and [raw data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_wxN2AQTtC8KtEmv21GNloLnuZtGj7-unf5dIqwCW4U/edit#gid=264063695).

When I posted the previous chapter, I got several enquiries as to just how big this fandom surge really is. It’s a great question, and I decided to compare the presence of Good Omens on AO3 to fanworks for several other screen adaptations of popular books or series:

  * **Sherlock** \-- I investigated the impact of the BBC TV show on the meta tag “Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms”
  * **Game of Thrones** \-- I investigated the impact of the TV show on the meta tag “A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms”  

  * **The Hobbit** \-- I investigated the impact of the Jackson movies on the meta tag “The Hobbit - All Media Types”
  * **Good Omens** \-- this fandom doesn’t yet have a meta tag that encompasses both TV and book, so I combined all the fanworks that used either the book or the movie tags (making sure not to double count the ones that used both tags)
  * I also investigated **The Hunger Games, Percy Jackson,** and **The Maze Runner,** but their AO3 fandoms were much smaller, so I ended up removing them from the graphs because they were too hard to see. But the complete data is available [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_wxN2AQTtC8KtEmv21GNloLnuZtGj7-unf5dIqwCW4U/edit?usp=sharing).
  * There are also many more that I didn’t look into because they started airing before the creation of AO3.



[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/y4s1dmzjmZv17gGq9)

Above, I’ve shown the number of AO3 fanworks produced per month in each of these fandoms. **If we just look at absolute numbers, Good Omens is an absolute Godzilla of a fandom, trouncing all others with ~5400 new fanworks produced in July alone.** The next biggest numbers of fanworks/month we see here are Sherlock S3 and Game of Thrones S8 -- and unlike Good Omens, those were not the first installments of those adaptation onscreen. 

But remember, AO3 has grown a great deal over the course of this graph. It was still a wee smol platform when Sherlock S1 aired, not yet widely adopted. So let’s repeat the above graph, but instead look at the percentage of total AO3 works in a month that are produced by each fandom:

[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/hSzwFPokhkm33Doj7)

Now we see a substantially different pattern emerge. **The initial Good Omens surge is still very impressive -- 3.7% of total AO3 fanworks produced in July! But it's now taking up about the same overall percentage of AO3 attention as Sherlock S1 did in it's first surge (3.8%), and just a bit more than the first Hobbit movie (3.2%).** And so far, the Good Omens fandom has not reached the peak frenzy that the Sherlock fandom did post-S2, producing a whopping 8.9% of AO3 fanworks in January 2014. But still, by this relative measurement, the Good Omens fandom surge is roughly greater than or equal to any other initial installment of a book adaptation that I can find since AO3 was founded. 

You may be wondering about other fandoms that are even bigger on AO3, some of which are even adaptations -- for instance, MCU is based on Marvel comics. I initially omitted MCU, because Iron Man 1 came out before AO3 was available, so the initial surge of fandom activity for that movie did not occur on AO3. However, we can add MCU for context (and also to compare to the huge surge of activity after the first Avengers film, which could be argued to be the first of the franchise): 

[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/Uhu7EKDnu4AeTjtPA)

[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/fHV4DuMYSbFeX8eN9)

Following the first Avengers film, **MCU produced an amazing 12% of all AO3 fanworks in a give month (May, 2012)**. And it continues to produce a very large percentage of AO3 fanworks. **But Good Omens produced almost exactly half as many fanworks as MCU in July, 2019 (5381 works vs. 10731 works, or 3.7% vs. 7.4% of AO3), and it appears to still be growing**. That is pretty impressive for an Amazon Prime TV show, based on a single 29-year-old book with a much smaller following than the Marvel comics. I can't wait to see where the fandom goes from here!


End file.
